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Heritage listing of buildings and places the world over has the ability to capture intrinsic cultural values from current and previous eras and present them to visitors and users in ways not immediately obvious to those who come into contact with it. The communication of heritage values to society is a complex mechanism that is vexed with myriad questions as to “whose heritage”, “what heritage” and “why this heritage”. It bespeaks the problems behind today’s claims of cultural ownership over historical artefacts. Additionally, the manner in which intrinsic heritage values is communicated and interpreted in society is beset with an assumed dominance of certain values over others. This is the complex nature of storytelling which surely leaves as much out as it includes (Carr). Cognitive bias is thus the basis of heritage as opposed to history itself which takes on a more rigorous approach (Lowenthal). The entire opus of heritage interpretation is premised on the narrative. This narrative is prone to the corruption of political, social and economic influences. It absorbs only what it can and puts out only what it will. Likewise, heritage listing as a means of designating and protecting heritage is prone to bias at the political, social and economic level. What remains un-listed therefore is as interesting as that which becomes listed. Accordingly, the listing process is exclusive and non-universal in its scope.The influence of economic, social and political factors upon the listing of a building or heritage place and the consequence for society in terms of the cost of this process is the theme of this article. It explores the notion of dominant ideology and its relation to cultural significance. It investigates the economic cost of sustaining heritage lists from both a legislative and intellectual point of view. It anticipates the overall weakness of the ‘heritage listing’ process inasmuch as it fails to properly protect and enliven heritage values in the post-listing phase. This article seeks to briefly examine the problems of heritage listing as a means of properly identifying meaningful cultural significance in society.

THE DEMISE OF HERITAGE IN N.S.W.

Introduction In the late 1970s and early 1980s when Australia’s heritage lists first developed, they were not indexed to any costing or system of economic accountability. Without such constraints, the lists began to grow – first gingerly and then, by the mid-90s, in full blossom. Today, there are more than 150,000 heritage items listed across Australia’s Federal, State and local jurisdictions. There is no official cost realisation of what this means. There is no official data that tells us what the net cost to society is in terms of the long-term up keep and sustainability of such a resource. Indeed, there is much published both anecdotally and academically about heritage being a positive externality; about the incalculable costs and benefits to society; about the good cheer of heritage; about the social and psychological positives that flow from the sector; about the characteristics and special qualities of the built heritage environment in its variegated urban, rural and coastal forms; about the obvious links to tourism and the contribution that the heritage sector makes to the enormous tourism market and even about the fact that heritage is able to hold its own in any real estate market whether residential, commercial or industrial. However, in financial terms, there are no studies existing in Australia that can tell us precisely what the net dollar cost of maintaining these 150,000 listed items is going to be.What Burden Government Needs to Bear The Productivity Commission Report (PCR) of 2006 delivered a sober message to the heritage sector. It argued that there is no good reason any longer for Australian governments to be involved in funding privately owned heritage. It is a little known fact that more than 90% of our built Australian heritage stock is privately owned. The PCR concluded that it would be unwise for governments to compete against market forces and that the true value of the heritage stock is best resolved by the market. In short, funding the sector through grants or stimuli would be seen as a distortion of market forces i.e. negative engineering that ultimately results in market failure. The upshot of the PCR is that heritage must fend for itself; that communities and not governments need to decide what should and should not be listed and that once listed; owners and communities must fund the resource. Such a sober pronouncement is tantamount to a volte face by government. Whereas it derived positive electoral currency from heritage for many years in the past i.e. as a platform for ethnic, social, historic and cultural identity – an agenda concluding in the twin discoveries of our ‘multiculturalism’ and our quintessential ‘Australianness’, it now tells us that heritage has served its political purpose and is no longer useful to governments as a motivating social cause. The audacity of this conclusion accords generally with the neo-liberal, economic rationalist position taken by governments in the developed world today. It underscores the shrinking public realm; the reversal of good fortune for public interest issues and the dependency that governments now have upon corporations and businesses to build essential infrastructure such as roads, rail, energy, schools, housing etc. This cycle of dependency has recently seen the rise of ‘developers’ as a new class in society. It sets up and facilitates special treatment by both governments and financial institutions for businesses that are capable of delivering such infrastructure projects. Progressively, the magnanimous Keynesian welfare approach to the economy of the 1930s has shifted towards a monetarist view of the world. In the process, the public interest component has become privatised, yet the apparatus and institutions set up to process and maintain the public interest sphere in the absence of government stewardship, is patently lacking. Nobody is quite sure how best to proceed. In the UK, PPPs (public private partnerships) constitute vehicles for delivering infrastructure projects today. It has become standard practice for governments to call upon such entities to serve public interest needs. Corporatising government in this fashion allows the public to be treated disdainfully by such entities especially where profits are concerned. Delivering the bare minimum is the bottom line. Their business as usual models bespeak a rift between governments and the people they serve.The Diminishing Public Realm Are we about to go down the same track in Australia? If so, have governments failed us in our endeavours to protect public space; to safeguard our heritage for future generations or are we about to witness the progressive decimation of our cultural heritage assets under the guise of a slow but determined campaign of attrition in which responsible government exits the stage right and we, the people are left to pick up the pieces; to reassemble the common cause so to speak? Put less emotively, the time is now ripe for certain social agendas to become formulated. Perhaps the clear message is that the heritage stock needs to become more responsively organised. Its true social and economic costs need to be calculated and its net value to society must become defined. How are we to do this especially against a backdrop of fragmented values in society? Can we be sure that the items we have already listed are appropriate – not only to us but to future generations. Are we sufficiently cognizant of ethnic trends in society; of second, third and fourth generation immigrants who have as much claim to the official Australian narrative as do more traditional sectors of society. If this is so, we need to look longer, deeper and wider. We need to embrace more holistically the myriad ethnic diversities of Australia’s Chinese, Lebanese, Asian, Baltic, African, American, Islander and other immigrant cultures. We need to integrate these into the common stock of goods, chattels and icons of our continually evolving society. Likewise, we need to embrace emergent heritages such as technologies that have come and gone; such as social institutions that have come and gone, such as fads, amusements, innovations, crazes, holidays, work practices, cults, pop-culture, now-culture etc. . We need to open the gates and let it all in. But at what cost and why is any of this necessary?The Substantive Nature of Heritage in Society It is a known phenomenon that societies swing between moments of great technological innovation and periods of nostalgic regressive concern. It is well documented that western European society has in the last 1000 years trended between historically nostalgic institutions and autocratic pronouncements of fresh and revisionist agendas. These oscillations are minutely expressed in various forms of artistic, technological and philosophical detail; in works of art; in written chronicles; in new styles of government and the general preoccupation of the hearts and minds of the people caught up in their tumult. Australia has itself passed through myriad iterations of foreign policy approaches, social institutions, ethnic makeup, technological developments, fads, crazes, influences (internal and foreign), economic booms and busts, more than half a dozen wars fought on foreign soil, national disasters not to mention the privations of individuals and communities. Could it be that heritage is such a trend; a passing fad, an interest of previous years; a quaint liaison with the past? If so, we remain bogged down with many useless items that do not belong in this world – they are better treated as relics which could probably all be documented digitally and then dispensed with. However, if heritage is not simply a trend and turns out to be more substantive, then we are faced with the unique task of organising, processing and managing an immensely valuable trans-generational resource to whose dynamic countless future generations will want access if only to bask in its putative worthiness as a means of transformative self- realisation. What I mean by this is that in the absence of guiding stewardship by government, we the people, the concerned citizens; those amongst us who hold all of this cultural diversity in high esteem need to take stock, strategise and work out effective means by which the remnant and emergent heritage stock is managed, accounted for, attributed to and fully sanctioned for those it will ultimately serve – all of this in the absence of legislative controls by government. Yet how is this to be done? What examples are there in which the ordinary people have rallied around public interest issues and pushed through with a cogent agenda? I can think of progress associations, the green bans of the 1970s, the Tasmanian Dams case of 1975, the anti-logging campaigns, campaigns by the National Trust since its formation in 1945, more recent marches on the Houses of Parliament by the people of Ku-ring-gai, the ‘Berangerooted Campaign’ and countless others throughout our history – all of which through their populist outreach agendas have turned the minds of people and ultimately governments to formulate policies in response. The Need for Heritage to become Self- funding Ironically, this is precisely how Australia’s heritage movement of the mid 70s kicked off. Between 1975 and 1983 – in eight short years, the entire nation had become heritage- endorsed; culturised into a set of integrated COAG strategies – each state and territory receiving its protective legislation coupled with our Federal government’s municipalised treaty obligations under a swath of international environment protection commitments. Local government was largely charged with delivery at the coal face, but not all of this has been successful. The promiscuity of the heritage movement in Australia flourished untrammelled from there on until 2006 in which it was stopped dead in its tracks by the PCR – Productivity Commission Report investigating the Australia’s historic heritage places. During its halcyon days, the lists grew from a mere clutch of iconic buildings in the urban centres to a wide range of natural, built, Aboriginal, archaeological, maritime, movable and spiritual hybrids. Seemingly, there was no end to what could be listed. Even intangible, folkloric customs, ways, beliefs, recipes, rites of passage, costume and religious practices not to mention cultural landscapes - became incorporated into the expanse of such indeterminate verisimilitude. It may be that the crassness of the PCR recommendations constitutes a response to the lassitude of the lists. Crass inasmuch as the fact that the PCR recommendations flew in the face of all the submissions made to the inquiry by professional heritage consultants during the sitting months of late 2005 and early 2006. The fact that none of the lists is properly indexed to current or future costs gave Treasury (authors and instigators of the investigation and PCR recommendations) it so called warrant of arrest. They stepped in to stem the tide of untrammelled list-growth; to plug what can only be imagined by Federal and State bean counters to be gross profligacy and waste. Hence, today, heritage has a bad name. The lists are frozen. Listing campaigns are considered by Councils and the State Government of NSW to be unnecessarily negative as a result of which a stagnancy has pervaded most of our listing institutions.In the Aftermath of the Productivity Commission Report 2006 The question now is; in the aftermath of the PCR, what are we to do? Are we to rationalise the stock by reducing it in number so as to make it more affordable or are we to ascertain the very best; the most authentic; the truest representation of our cultural aspirations? Alternatively, we may keep everything we have listed but simply organise ourselves a bit better by allowing the privately owned heritage stock to be managed as collectives rather like community gardens or in the style of owners corporations as practiced under strata and community title real property law. There is no shortage of good models for all of this standing every chance of success. Indeed, it constitutes the very basis upon which societies develop; aggregating around a series of common cause issues and municipalising such concerns into codified behaviours which in turn become sanctioned through policing taboos to support their ultimate moral purpose. In this sense, the clarion call to arms has arrived. The message is that governments need not be seen as the hand that feeds the heritage. The people themselves must surely be capable of organising, strategising and implementing plans of action. To take control without government assistance galvanizes affected listees into action. The aim is to internalise the resource; to manage it strictly upon available resources; to reduce the need for government intervention by transferring all of the protective concern for the resource into a system of belief rather than one of duty. Belief in any cause is sufficient to motivate its adherents. The corollary is that the very heritage legislation we have come to regard as being the protector of the resource over the last 40 years in Australia may now be accountable for its demise. Objectifying values as manageable entities may be more unworkable than originally anticipated. By this I mean, having at the very outset enacted protective heritage legislation, we were unwittingly putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank. Heritage like all other values in society is a highly contested precinct. What I deem to be important in society may not accord with random others who do not share my beliefs and principles. Official narratives are prone to scrutiny and disregard. History has shown that dominant ideologies give way to competing ideologies and thus a continual dialectic of thesis: anti-thesis and: synthesis is set in train. Such Hegelian perpetuity is programmed to render all endeavours ultimately inutile but that does not stop human ingenuity from refining; resolving; responding; re-inventing.Conclusion In conclusion, this paper seeks to register an event on the heritage horizon that obliges those concerned to think about heritage in a completely different way compared to that upon which we have come to rely so heavily over the past 40 years. The current system has failed us for the reason that it has not adequately safeguarded the resource that belongs to us all. Without having documented it, we have slid into a horrific attrition of our cultural heritage resources. We have witnessed governments riding rough-shod over our heritage by either dragging the chain; voting out new listings; heading the agenda off at the pass or simply slashing vast tranches of cultural heritage and in so doing hiding from public view that which properly belongs to us. Similarly, we have seen developers cut deep swathes into our cultural landscapes and in so doing deny future generations access to it. We have seen building owners lackadaisical in their disregard for the resource abandon buildings, farms, places of immense cultural vibrancy. We have come to rely too heavily upon what I call ‘Section 79 Pedagogy’. What started off good has become very bad. The entire body of protective heritage legislation in NSW has failed the test of legislative progeny. Whereas it was conceived initially to properly document and record; to properly assess and abate, it has become a weapon by means of which the heritage sector is summarily beaten into submission. The rise of Part 3A, the repugnant SEPPs and various other planning instruments have come to haunt us. These instruments raise the interests of developers above the common public interest of heritage. They clear the path for destruction relegating important social and economic decisions about heritage to deals made behind closed doors; away from public scrutiny. In the legal framework, we have witnessed clever barristers and solicitors make mischief in Court winning costly battles of advocacy for their priapic clients. Such people wield far too much power to destroy. Their actions result in a permanent disfigurement of the resource. Lastly, this paper seeks to promote a fresh agenda for the heritage sector in Australia over the next thirty years. It seeks to find a workable self-funding economic model – one free of government interference; one based upon heritage building owners organising themselves into corporations with rules, rights, bylaws and management strategies committed to the protection of the resource in common; not as a duty but under the aegis of belief; one that acts by itself for itself; one that takes stock of the true economic consequences of having 150,000 Australian heritage items on our lists. Each property on that list needs to be individually re-assessed, physically analysed and costed in terms of current capital costs to repair and ongoing future costs. Then based on the information gathered, private owners need to decide what they want to keep i.e. what to vest permanently in the national public interest and what they want to discard. Without this, the resource can never be properly accounted for. People need to be bound by commitment and this can only ever work if there is a joint pecuniary interest at stake. DCPs and LEPs administered by third party bureaucrats no longer cut it. We need to look elsewhere if we are serious in our efforts to protect such a fragile disseminating resource.